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nerican^s View of the Great War 



THERLAND 



WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 

Author of ** Midstream/' ** Down Among Men/' 
'*Routledge Rides Alone/' etc. 



C Behind all petty political results of the 
Great War surges the cosmic passion 
of a whole world warring to end war. 

CThe meek and lowly are tired of being 
dragged from their work to serve as 
cannon-meat. Dumb are they, but a great 
novelist here voices their demaifd for free- 
dom—sings the Great War's immeasurable 
significance as the last war. 



c 



America's message, the plowman's mes- 
sage, to the proud war-lords. 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Publiihert New York 



FATHERLAND 



WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 



FATHERLAND 



BY 



WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 

Author of "Down Among Men," "Midstream," 
"Routledge Rides Alone," etc. 



With "The Army of the Dead" by Barry Pain 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



•Ce 



Copyright, 1914 
By George H. Doran Company 



DEC 12 1914 

.A3S7933 






THE ARMY OF THE DEAD 
By Barry Pain 

I dreamed that overhead 

I saw in twilight gray 
The Army of The Dead 

Marching upon its way. 
So still and passionless 

With faces so serene, 
That scarcely could one guess 

Such men in war had been. 

No mark of hurt they bore 

Nor smoke nor bloody stain; 
Nor suffered any more 

Famine, fatigue or pain; 
Nor any lust of hate 

Now lingered in their eyes — 
Who have fulfilled their fate, 

Have lost all enmities. 
[5] 



FATHERLAND 

A new and greater pride 

So quenched the pride of race 
That foes marched side by side 

Who once fought face to face. 
That ghostly army's plan 

Knows but one race, one rod — 
All nations there are man 

And the one King is God ! 

No longer on their ears 

The bugle's summons falls; 
Beyond these tangled spheres 

The Archangel's trumpet calls ; 
And by that trumpet led 

Far up the exalted sky 
The Army of The Dead 

Goes by, and still goes by. 

Look upward, standing mute; 
Salute ! 



[6] 



FATHERLAND 



FATHERLAND 



A LABOR-GANG was trenching for 
tile in a near field and I went to the 
boss to hire one of his men. Of course I 
could have one, he said, remarking that 
they were treading on one another's feet, 
as it were. . . . "Take Joe over there. 
. . . Hai, Joe!" 

A derby hat at any season is unmiti- 
gated, but in the first days of August, in 
the splendid fury of summer, this ap- 
proach was not unlike the passing of a 
kitchen-range. Joe was clapped in it. The 
whole field had a pent and airless look — 
from this crown of labor, heavy, sagging 
and moss}^ I inquired of the boss if Joe 
were hopelessly addicted. He feared so, 
but added: 

[9] 



FATHERLAND 

"You'll forget that. Joe's a bull with 
a pick." 

I led him to the house and brought forth 
a wide light straw. In firm quiet manner, 
I took the bleak hearse from his head and 
hung it from a projecting stone high 
against the cobbled masonry of the 
stable, wondering if it would affect the 
pigeon-crosses, as Jacob's rods of hazel 
and chestnut at the water-troughs ring- 
streaked the new - born calves. Joe's 
troubled face looked less lardy under the 
straw-thatch, though his eyes turned often 
to the cobble work. In the afternoon I 
found the straw hat hanging there, too 
gentle and humane to alter Nature in any 
way, unless to puzzle the hawks for a day 
or two, or stimulate the spiders to new 
manners of suspension. The derby was 
back in place, clamped solid under the 
arc of the pick. 

The idea was to shelve a Roman path 
from the shore to the top of the clay-bluff, 
a fifty-foot rise. Joe, comprehending 

[10] 



FATHERLAND 

presently, tore loose at the bank with a 
brute strength altogether new to me. I 
regarded him frequentlj^ and with alarm 
lest he turn blue. He could forget him- 
self in that rending labor, as one at his 
best forgets the instrument when typing 
with machine. Labor, the heaviest and 
least inspiring, yet it filled him so that he 
asked no more. Having found his w^ork, 
he lost himself and the illusion, time ; gave 
himself to his task — a celestial profit in 
that mystery which touches the spirit of 
creativeness and silently fits a man to live 
indeed. 

It was the children who found out that 
Joe was Russian ; that he had been in this 
country for a year, had a wife and baby 
boy at home, shortly to be sent for. In 
the afternoons they would fill his dinner- 
box with tomatoes, radishes and cucum- 
bers. Meanwhile the path shadowed forth 
from the bluff and Joe paved it with 
gravel from the beach. 

I found it good to be with him from 

[11] 



FATHERLAND 

time to time, and it came to me with 
pathos, but very clearly, that he had come 
to America to find his Fatherland. He 
represented in a way the excellent sim- 
plicity which Tolstoi turned back to re- 
discover, although the simplicity that Tol- 
stoi yearned for is ahead. He recalled 
to my mind Manchuria, too ; the Christless 
havoc of the war-days there, and the morn- 
ing I awakened to hear a brigade of his 
fellow-peasants shouting forth its soul in 
song — singing, it seemed to me, as men 
never sang before, led singing to the 
slaughter of Liaoyang — faces like Joe's, 
miles of them, decent simple men, the stuff 
to make gods from, and murdered like a 
pestilence of vermin a few days after- 
ward, not by the Japanese, but by the de- 
bauched appetites of their princes. 

And now Russia was at it again, all 
Em*ope in frightful demolition, and the 
poor of the world to pay. First the flower 
of the i)eople, then the stalk — all but the 
root to go. Every ship and shell, the last 

[12] 



FATHERLAND 

confiscations and the first by the strong 
hands of war, indemnities demanded by 
victor, wounds of pride, the cessations of 
ahnighty trade, even the infringements 
of neutrality, to be paid by the poor of 
the world — the bewildered and hunger- 
driven poor, first in blood and then in 
famine and labor. And from the under- 
men, from the maimed and the heavy- 
laden must the earth be replenished again. 
A last time. . . . 



[13] 



FATHERLAND 



IT was one of the children who very re- 
cently asked Joe if he would have 
to go away and fight. His pick poised 
and then lowered with its own weight. 
His hard, rounded palms opened to the 
sky. A look of childish terror came into 
his face. 

"No — no — no!" he said, shaking his 
head, as a child aroused from evil dream. 
I saw that there was added terror, because 
the little boy had spoken it. 

It signified the destruction of all he had 
worked for, the wrecking of his dream. 
Not vague, nor dull, nor greedy, this 
dream — a clear, clean, home-making, la- 
bor-giving conception rather; a dream that 
had found its form through thousands of 
tons of labor, hewn and graven in earth- 
clay, but clearly done in the sight of God, 
I think, an equitable holding. 

It was not the fear of war, but the fear 
he would be called. Across the world, but 
still cornered. In the heart of a strange 

[14] 



FATHERLAND 

country, yet he was not his own law. Cer- 
tainly, Joe had not found his Father 
here. . . . 

He lived with desperate frugality, slept 
in the corner of a machine-shop ; yet every 
stroke outdoors of his strong hand was 
constructive and not for self, done with 
simple valor for a woman and child. He 
was established in the beginnings of in- 
dividuality, because he worked for others ; 
heroically on his way, requiring no senti- 
ment to call forth the honor of worthy 
men. For there is but one path. Genius 
nor prophet need ask to be more whole- 
heartedly on the way. One path without 
beginning and without end, but every path 
runs two ways. Those who rise against 
the grade, who face the East, are brothers. 

Yesterday he touched the old hat as 
I approached, leaned the pick-handle 
against the rim of the trench, for he was 
hip-deep in the ground, and rolled a cigar- 
ette, the one delicate thing that Joe does 
with his hands. 
[15] 



FATHERLAND 

"I go back to Russia," he said, quietly. 

"To your family, Joe?" I asked. 

"No— to fight." 

No terror now, not even the opposite 
swing to apathy. The call had come, the 
dream was ended, his prayer failed, his 
entity lost. The pressure of centuries had 
prevailed upon the beginnings of his per- 
sonal spirit. . . . He worked until six as 
usual, said good-bye as usual. The chil- 
dren ate their supper in silence. Joe meant 
Russia and world-war to them; to us all 
the war was more intimate and horrible. 
. . . "In a space of fifty square yards," 
I read from a Belgian chronicle, "the 
bodies of two hundred Germans lay cry- 
ing for burial." 

"Why, that's just the size of the vege- 
table garden," said one of the children. 

At the end of dusk that night I went 
out alone to the edge of the bluff. Still- 
ness, save for the crickets and cicadas ; the 
trees still and the sky pure, the white mag- 
nolias blooming again. The Lake tranced 

[16] 



FATHERLAND 

the last of the light; lakes of corn were 
a silent background; children laughed in 
the distance among the pleasant lights of 
the neighboring cottages. The two noblest 
planets seen from earth weve in the sky 
and no others yet, a rare visitation — Jupi- 
ter rising in the East, Venus setting in the 
West. The land teemed with richness and 
peace; and the white immortal reflections 
in the sky completed the globe of promise. 
Yet fifty years from now they will say 
(never quite comprehending) of this wan- 
ing summer of nineteen fourteen, "In the 
midst of that year all Europe went sud- 
denly insane." ... A last time. 



[17] 



FATHERLAND 



HOW clear it is that lawless ego turns 
insane — and yet, so long have the 
multitudes lost themselves in obedience to 
a few families that have never learned to 
govern themselves, much less their race; 
the many fallen victim often to imperial 
sons who have not the intelligence to keep 
themselves clean, mere galvanisms of de- 
graded passion. Inbred, luxury-lapped, 
world-fattened princes, played upon by 
every illusion and destructive force of the 
world of matter, nurtured in nests of soft- 
ening, out of which any common man, not 
stupid, would pluck his own son as from 
a net of the devil; and the fortunes of 
whole races of men in the hands of such 
decadents — down-grade men, their backs 
to the East, drawn not to Heaven nor any 
ideal, but like other brute material, an- 
swering with little or no complication the 
pull of the earth's center. Before God 
that man is king only who has mastered 
himself, and this is the last time for the 

[18] 



FATHERLAND 

multitudes to be slaughtered and betrayed 
by the mock divinity of war-lords. 

It was very clear (though I had been 
unable to perceive it before this rending 
of Europe and the world) that there must 
be a great war to end war. In no other 
way was that master of lies to be destroyed 
— that the only safe peace is in the pres- 
ence of great armaments. All the seers 
and prophets of the world could not make 
themselves heard in the din of gun prac- 
tise and riveting armor plate. 

The poor will die and the poor will pay, 
and then the poor will speak — that is the 
high and thrilling hope of this hour. 
Peace, not as a policy, but as a principle 
— the old love of man for his neighbor — 
that is the very essence of our future wel- 
fare and nobility. It is tragically clear 
now that war, in its very nature, could not 
die a lingering death, but must die with 
violence — a passing that will rend the 
world. 

A passing, too, of the last imperial 
[19] 



FATHERLAND 

house, and all the barbarism and flunkey- 
ism appertaining; for the spiritual de- 
formity of kings can only survive, and 
continue to be a breeding-bed of war, 
where a corresponding flunkeyism exists 
in the breasts of the people. The passing 
of Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Romanoff 
and other national parasites and baneful 
autocracies, all roots and lines that ramify 
them, not only cut down but burned after- 
ward — the trade-cunning of Krupp and 
his like with them — that this may be the 
true and final extermination of the army 
worm. The strong peasant stalk and 
bloom where they cling and devour — this 
is the great sacrifice. A last time, for the 
poor of the world must now perceive the 
truth. The final tragedy of God's many 
— that the dream and the spirit of peace, 
conceived in agony, brought forth in this 
planetary parturition of war, may emerge 
not a dream, but clothed in the body and 
brain of flesh to move forever among men. 

[20] 



FATHERLAND 

/N a space of fifty square yards, the 
bodies of two hundred Germans lay 
crying for burial " and on the same sheet 
this cry of America, "Now is the time for 
us to profit!" The States of America 
must go to their knees to be rid of that 
temptation — the voice of the trade mind 
at its worst and lowest, a blend of green 
and yellow, of covetousness and coward- 
ice, in the presence of Europe's ineffable 
disaster, which if not overcome now will 
bring us to the pass of Europe or worse, 
before it is done. The spirit of peace flees 
to fields of carnage from the very atmo- 
sphere of this conception. 

Not a Fatherland, but a Prussian 
America which raises this voice : 

"Let us seize the non-belligerent world- 
trade now. Let us build, buy and lease 
ships now for this trade. Let us spend 
the next few years in the forced growth 
of our navy ; by every sacrifice to accumu- 
late such a navy as will stand with Europe 
[21] 



FATHERLAND 

in strength, and protect our new world- 
trade, when damaged Europe returns for 
her markets " 

Neighboring Europe gashed open — the 
stench around the world from her uncov- 
ered dead — and every scream of the Eu- 
ropean tragedy now and in the more ter- 
rible months to come — the result of that 
identical predatory instinct and no other. 

The entity behind such a voice is with- 
out humor. 

There is also an America, not Prussian, 
which is acquiring a new mind and heart 
from the moaning and misery of its neigh- 
bors, and is striving to put away forever 
the tarantula from its own breast. This 
America has perceived that the affairs of 
an uj)right man among his fellows does 
not compel him to live in a fortress; and 
that this is a national verity also. 

Real America has found the impulse in 
this cataclysm to become a truly produc- 
tive people, not to develop its already 
powerful trade acuteness. Production 

[22] 



FATHERLAND 

does not mean to multiply by mechanical 
means any single article to such an extent 
that greater energy and acumen must be 
spent in marketing than in production. 
This is a fundamental evil of the age now 
closed by war. Real America perceives 
that a nation with land commensurate to 
its population needs only to develop its 
own riches, its own particular potencies, 
and the peculiar genius of its people, 
through Fatherland-stimulus for the pro- 
duction of its best, the production of qual- 
ity not quantity, in order to compel clean 
trade with all the world — because national 
resources are like individual resources; 
there are no duplicates. 

No law nor reason prevents us from ac- 
cepting in silence the certain advantages 
accruing from Europe's abandonment of 
trade, but aggressively to accumulate 
trade under naval protectorate in this hour 
(in which it seems that the high God is 
winnowing the earth to find His few) 
such is the final debauchery of virtue. 
[23] 



FATHERLAND 

Here is the chance for us to become 
workmen, not squirrels. The very streets 
are full of strange new needs, because we 
are suddenly denied the products of Eu- 
ropean workmen. We miss their mastery 
in chemicals and minerals and wood. Here 
is the spur of need to make us workmen 
and masters of the secrets of matter — but 
to remain masters of matter in spirit and 
truth, the whole reason and purpose of 
manhood, adding to matter the intuitions 
of the spirit, and not making matter our 
God, as later Europe has done, for world- 
wars and every wretchedness and lamen- 
tation is the price of just that. 

Never before in the history of the 
United States was there such time for aus- 
terity and contemplation, such need for 
sensitiveness to reality, for flippant and 
temporal things to be put quite away — 
such a need to burn and weep and pray for 
the abatement of agony and the new reign 
of God in the world — such a need to give 
and not to gain, to love and not to seize. 

[24] 



FATHERLAND II 



II 



SOME days after Joe left I rode by 
a field of grain where the army 
worm had camped for loot and outrage. 
The owner was making an effort to save 
part of the crop. 

"But it's not much use," he said. "To 
be a killing force the solution must be 
strong enough to check the grain, too. 
Between the poison and the worm there's 
not much chance of harvest. I'd have 
done about as well to plow under the 
whole business." 

It was one more of the perfect anal- 
ogies of man's relation to the source of 
things — analogies that literally abound in 
vine and grass and shore. ... I thought 
of the fires and deluges that stand tradi- 
tional in the dim background of all races 
of men. The revelations of geology show 
that there has been shuffling of features, 
utter dishevelments of the face of the 
[27] 



FATHERLAND 

globe — an eye now where a tooth once 
lay, a nostril where an ear reposed. I 
thought, too, of the first and most sig- 
nificant realization which the reading of 
astronomy imposes : that of the exceeding 
delicacy of the earth's present position; 
how, indeed, we are dependent for life 
and all that now is upon the small matter 
of the tilt of the poles; that we, as men, 
are products, as it were, not only of earth's 
precarious position, but of her more pre- 
carious tilt. 

The oldest and most respectable of all 
questions now recurred: What is it for? 
What is life for? What grain — ^what is 
the desired harvest? 

Man can only answer man. There is 
no other answer within his intellectual 
rims. It can't be man's body. The ulti- 
mate significance certainly cannot be the 
flesh of man which dies so freely. At the 
same time it is clear that the flesh is an 
instrument of manifestation, a stage of 
being, as the worm is a part of the cycle 

[28] 



FATHERLAND 

which attains wings in the butterfly. The 
desired grain of the tilted earth, then, is 
the certain power behind the flesh ; in fact, 
that power and not the flesh, is man him- 
self. In short, the grain is the soul of man 
which puts on flesh from time to time, pos- 
sibly, as a traveler takes difl*erent vehicles 
to make his journey. 
• That which reaches the end of the jour- 
ney is the grain; and since the flesh helps 
to forward the immortal home, it becomes 
a profound consideration. . . . 

Sermonizing — but not in a religious 
mood, as usually considered. The thun- 
dering drive of every thought was the 
Great War; yet I had no thought nor 
care for nations and their boundaries, nor 
for kings, politics, dumas, reichstags, co- 
lonial interests, the almighty markets — not 
even for Rheims and Louvain. 

I was thinking of Joe, and the peasant 
millions, his brothers. 

Two, five, seven thousand the day just 
now they are slaying the child-souled peas- 
[29] 



FATHERLAND 

antry; herding them by the milHon in the 
midst of the most demorahzing conditions 
the darkened minds of men ever invented. 
We need not think of the women and chil- 
dren — just of the men. Yesterday, to-day 
and to-morrow, the peasants are slain — 
until we have lost the relation of numbers. 

And this — the darkest winter that the 
world has ever known — is only a culmina- 
tion of the misery of the peasantry. They 
have been preyed upon and massed and 
manhandled in the best of times and sea- 
sons. Worse than death can happen to 
the peasantry. The ultimate significance 
has to do with the souls of these children, 
and their souls have been steadily cruelly 
smothered through the fat years of peace. 
This smothering of souls is not accom- 
plished by death, but by life. 

There have appeared among us giants 
of desire — men literally who want the 
earth; strong men of baronial appetites, 
whose aspirations at their highest are level- 
eyed, never uplifted, mainly perverted. 

[30] 



FATHERLAND 

These are the whip-masters and soul- 
smotherers of the peasantry. These are 
also the king-keepers. They are masters 
of the near and the obvious and the pal- 
pable; because of their very dexterity in 
the manipulation of material affairs they 
are tolerated as the rulers of men. They 
and their agents are everywhere — first 
hand they move among the peasantry, and 
the stupid middle world calls them the 
great men, within the hearing of our chil- 
dren. What can the peasant do but be- 
lieve, and in his terror and havoc formu- 
late such an ideal for himself in the fu- 
ture? It is known now, even in the pub- 
lic schools, that the formulation of any 
ideal is the matrix of the action to be. 

Sorrow can only sweeten, but the pro- 
longed effects of theft and greed, the 
ever-tightening coercion ; the noise and the 
shine and the meaning of coins, the loss 
of the love and meaning of labor; the 
trade-ideal ever before the fresh impres- 
sionable eye, and proclaimed by all voices 
[31] 



FATHERLAND 

to be earth's glory in the highest — such is 
the soul-smothering of our children, the 
peasantry; a kind of reptile poisoning 
that has entered and done its work; and 
now the devouring is on, a more loathsome 
but less destructive process, for only the 
bodies suffer that. The low poisonous 
passions of the world stupefied first, be- 
fore the devouring of war. 

The peasantry of any race is its soil and 
substance. It is the bed of its human na- 
ture ; it holds the future. Hope and mys- 
teiy attach to it, and all the glowing mys- 
tery of promise that ignites the ardor of 
real parenthood. The true great men of 
the world, having put on a larger dimen- 
sion of consciousness, turn to the peasan- 
try for the symbol of the cosmic simplic- 
ity to come. They pray for the simple 
healing faith which so often is the verj^ 
conduct of life of the peasantry. If the 
world were ruled by the true great men, 
and not by the predatory, the younger- 
souled people would be guided and guard- 

[32] 



FATHERLAND 

ed with a passion and purity that would 
hallow the earth. For the peasant is so 
earnest to be led, so eager and ready to 
follow. That is the heart-rending pity of 
his plight to-day. He was oppressed and 
he was afflicted,, yet he opened not his 
mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the 
slaughter^ and as a sheep before her shear- 
ers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. 
There are men in Russia, in America, 
who would die for Joe and his brothers; 
who would die daily to make him see ; men 
who love and understand him, who would 
not kill him, but teach him the paths of 
beauty and be taught by his blessedness. 
But these are not the fathers of the coun- 
tries; often, rather, they are the hunted 
and the hanged. Still, they and their 
peasant children are the salt of the earth 
that has kept it from decay; they are the 
grace of the world — the holy ones, who 
have stayed so far the planetary plowing. 



[33] 



FATHERLAND 



I WRITE in the midst of the greatest 
battle the earth has ever known — 
the issue as j^et undecided. Yet with all 
the intensity of this hour, partisanship 
does not enter. In fact it is not without 
a shudder that one thinks of what a con- 
clusive victory of either side would mean 
at this time. Final victory at this hour 
would be a triumph of militarism, an ex- 
tension and revitalizing of the old, the vile ; 
for the same destructive forces that have 
been proven and branded for every seeing 
eye ; a victory of imperialistic armaments, 
of field strategies, of diplomatic sagaci- 
ties, and these no less than the blood-let- 
ting of men are of the old hells of earth, 
and the sources of all our misery. 

This war is the anointing of the grain- 
field. The stand of grain must endure 
not only the devouring of the parasite, 
but the withering of the poison. Yet if 
there is a harvest to come ; if there is hope 
of harvest, of any grain or balm or future 

[34] 



FATHERLAND 

light — the parasite, at least, must be de- 
stroyed. 

Not only the kings, but the king-keep- 
ers. "Whom the gods would destroy, they 
first make mad." It would seem that the 
war has begun that, but the work is not 
yet well advanced. Victory for either 
army system at this hour, and all the 
diplomatic asseverations, evasions, rejoin- 
ders, surrejoinders, and attainders to fol- 
low would not cleanse the field. Rather 
it would seem to me to start to heaven such 
a stench, and open to the sky such a spec- 
tacle of blasting as would send the Hus- 
bandman right quickly for the plow. 

There is a line of cause and effect run- 
ning truer than human vision from the 
breaking-out of throne-taints in 1870 to 
the heart of the present conflict. There 
are no clean hands among the principals 
of this, the Great War; and the New Era 
(if earth be spared the plowing under) 
will see it, and its heart will not soon cease 
to bleed for those who have paid in blood 
[35] 



FATHERLAND 

and famine. Final victoiy now for either 
cause, and the poor of the triumphant con- 
nection would not be the sooner fed, nor 
more decently fed in the future. Yet 
they are being slain in such numbers that 
the press of the world cannot give space 
to the names. 



[36] 



FATHERLAND 



THEY call them serfs in Russia, some- 
times moujiks. It is true they are 
children; that they require to be led; as 
yet they are not conscious individual 
forces, but talents to be accounted for by 
their fathers. So far they have had the 
steel and the leaded thong, the impreg- 
nation of every crime. 

Nicholas says: "I will enter Berlin, if 
I have to sacrifice my last moujik" — as 
one might say, "my last copper." 

That alone should be enough to stop 
war, if men were men. . . . Less than ten 
years ago the peasants came in to see 
Nicholas; from the far country and the 
near; through the snow, they came, hun- 
gry, afoot, in thousands, big thoughts in 
their breasts. They had reached the 
ends of their powers and endurance, they 
thought, and had come quietly to ask help 
of the father. They would place their 
story before him and all would be well, 
for the father would understand. 
[37] 



FATHERLAND 

You recall that Nicholas saw them com- 
ing, and fled. All his life he had fled from 
palace to palace. It was all he knew. 
Fleeing, he called to Vladimir to treat 
with them, and Vladimir turned the treat- 
ing over to his Cossacks. That Sabbath, 
you remember, the red flower bloomed in 
the snow — covering the city streets it burst 
into bloom — the red flower of the peas- 
antry which is redder than the blood of 
kings — the lives of thousands sprinkled 
upon the snow that Sabbath day. 

Truly they had been taught to call him 
Little Father; and he, the flitting ghost 
of the palaces, means to use the last of 
them now. He has called them by the 
million — and God pity the wretched mir- 
acle of it! — they seem to obey. 

So long as they obey, the war must go 
on, and the moment they cease to obey — 
there can be no war again. 



[38] 



FATHERLAND 

THERE is no spiritual vitality remain- 
ing in the entities known as Prussia 
and the Balkans, nor in the Russia of 
Nicholas, although all the potentialities 
of splendid spiritual flowering are still 
within the hearts of the peasantry. What 
remains in the entities represented by these 
names is an obsession, a down-pulling and 
destroying energy which has galvanized 
with false life the entire organism within 
these boundaries. The Europe of such 
names is a house of madness. Enough 
for the moment to say that the struggle 
of good and evil in England, Germany 
and France, if finished in this hour, would 
be a triumph of the old and the evil and 
the insane. 

The passion of a New Era must 
triumph from this war, or after it will 
come eff acement and the deluge. 

For the ideals of the world at this hour 
are not lifted ideals, and it is a late day 
in the world for low ideals, even for the 
[39] 



FATHERLAND 

level eye. War should have been extinct 
centuries ago. Our only hope is that the 
carnage from which we now avert our 
eyes is war's self-destruction, and the final 
rebuke upon the several peoples who have 
been found so blind as to allow the mak- 
ing of war to rest in the hands of matter- 
masters and decadents. There is but one 
answer to this rebuke — a refusal longer 
to engage. 

The New Era — or else what remains 
for a little time longer, will not be worth 
living in for those who have held the 
dream. For such — the New Era, or none 
here. The United States of America is 
as deeply concerned in this war as France 
or Germany. Those of our people who 
are not lifted from the profound ruin of 
personal intents by the conditions now 
abroad in the world are meaningless in 
this crucial and terrible hour of the earth's 
judgment as a spiritual experiment. And 
you who moan so loudly over Rheims and 
Louvain — I ask you, what do you think 

[40] 



FATHERLAND 

of the destruction of the peasantry? The 
New Era does not need ancient relics for 
its ideals of beauty, but very much it 
needs the souls of men. 

Either a Fatherland, or chaos to come. 
Every voice out of the past has called us 
to do away with boundaries, to end im- 
perialism and material greed. Every in- 
vention of the past fifty years has laughed 
at separate language, at distances and 
man-made boundaries and every estrange- 
ment of people from people. The planet 
is one in wire and voice and meaning; 
the oneness of God and Nature has been 
the cry of every seer. 

We are not estranged spiritually, nor 
in ideal. The growth of our individuality 
is monstrous, until it turns from self to 
service. From Buddha, from Laotze, 
from Jesus, to the latest voice among us, 
so lost now in pandemonium, the spirit 
of man is proclaimed to be the grain of 
the earth, and the spirit of man is one. 

If there is to be a New Era, there is 

[41] 



FATHERLAND 

to be a Fatherland, but the blasphemous 
fatherlands of to-day shall not enter. 
Destroyers of children shall not enter. 
Except that ye become as little children, 
ye may not enter. 



[42] 



FATHERLAND III 



Ill 

I WAS sitting out of the wind on the 
Roman path that Joe had made ; try- 
ing to think it out on the basis that Mother 
Earth was yet young, and far from the 
season of Fall plowing. It didn't come 
clearly, but a profitable impulse did oc- 
cur, and this was to make a call I had 
long promised myself, upon a happy man, 
named Milt, some miles up the road. . . . 
I came at length to an eight or ten acre 
piece under glass — the gusty shine of late 
October upon it — a day that didn't know 
just what to do next. Milt came toward 
me, a collie pup in his arm, and a little 
girl tugging at his free hand. This is a 
glimpse of his story : 

"We came out here five years ago, a 
bit whipped in health and otherwise from 
the city. We dared to be poor — had our 
faces fixed for that. The second fall I 
found a tomato-seedling sprouting out of 
[45] 



FATHERLAND 

due time in the door-yard, and transplant- 
ed it under our first small bit of glass. I 
couldn't have been very busy that morn- 
ing. Well, that turned out to be the 
legacy " 

"I heard you were making a vulgar 
lot of money," said I. 

"No, I almost fell for that, but thought 
better of it. I'm making enough. The 
seedling came along fine and husky, and 
about Christmas I saw where to begin 
for next year — to market a fine tomato 
just long enough after the northern sea- 
son so that people have a relish for them, 
and before the southern producers begin 
to ship north in quantity. But a man 
could do it with berries or melons or as- 
paragus." 

"You say you almost fell for making 
a lot of money?" I asked curiously. 

"Well, you see it opened big. I found 
myself in the tension for more, more. I 
planned vast acreage, even a glass works, 
but I began to feel lame in the head along 

[46] 



FATHERLAND 

the same old routes that the town had 
worn so deep. Then it occurred to us — 
what we had come out here for. We 
talked it over and decided to call in all 
the wild expansion stuff; allowed that we 
had better leave some of the county for 
other men to play in, and slowly the fever 
subsided." 

I was thinking that the City must have 
bitten Milt rather deep. Then it occurred 
that he would never have noticed that to- 
mato-seedling if his brain had been full 
of fortune dreams that morning. He had 
come close to smashing the jewel after- 
ward, by his own word. . . . Now, his 
holdings were proportioned generously to 
the needs of his house; he had them grate- 
fully in hand, also well-in-hand his squir- 
rel and beaver instincts and the barn mad- 
ness. Milt's eyes were not held to the 
ground; he was not dependent upon 
others; his lines of interest were not 
stretched out unduly; in fact, he was in a 
safe and sane relation with mundane 
[47] 



FATHERLAND 

things. Not in a single detail, so far as 
I could see, did the analogy break between 
Milt's establishment and a happy nation. 
. . . Milt was bringing up his own chil- 
dren. 

"I don't care for the schools," he said. 
"They didn't do a good job for me; and 
while they may be a lot better now, they're 
not right. At least I don't think they are 
right, and thinking that way I certainly 
should dare to gamble on the education of 
my own children ! A man doesn't want to 
use too much glass for this kind of 
seedling, however " 

Milt wouldn't have time for this, had he 
been caught in the great fortune dream- 
ing. ... A nation should bring up its 
own children. No individual would dare 
to risk himself as a teacher in a true 
Fatherland. 

Just so surely as Milt would have ruined 
the unique vitality of his house by fall- 
ing into the dream of great expansion, 
just so surely does an intrinsically small 

[48] 



FATHERLAND 

power with a passion for wealth and colo- 
nization threaten, in its most amicable mo- 
ments, the very principles of peace; and 
in the end destroy itself and all suspected 
tissue surrounding. 

Milt has land proportioned to the needs 
of his establishment, a free highway to 
the market, also time and disposition to 
develop the particular values and poten- 
cies of the entire scheme; having these he 
is a successful and happy man, who can 
laugh, if he were of that temper, at all 
ulterior insanities. A successful and 
happy nation must have these. But that 
nation which in its proper self is but a 
capitol and suburbs, which becomes a for- 
midable power through an aggressive pol- 
icy and the mastering of the destinies of 
alien peoples; its interests sprawled over 
the several seas; one of the necessities of 
its mastery, an enforcement of the con- 
viction upon the alien peoples of their 
own inferiority; the processes of its mas- 
tery being frequent displays of power 
[49] 



FATHERLAND 

and a steady system of artful diplomacy; 
— such a nation is not making of itself a 
fatherland, but something very much like 
a spider-land, acceptable only to such gods 
of the universe as delight in pure spider- 
like tendencies. 

If INIilt were to ride forth on a conquest 
of the county, he would first be compelled 
to make his house into a citadel, thorough- 
ly to barb his lands, set watch-dogs and 
arm all hands. Rivalry of material in- 
terest abroad enforces domestic defence. 
Tenuous lines of conquest, the concentra- 
tion of riches at home — these call for jaws 
and claws and fighting instincts, without 
which no spider can keep up a prosper- 
ous lair, pleasantly hung and strewn with 
drained carcasses. 

Neither man nor nation can honestly 
or decently overrule another and con- 
tinue long to be a power; for the lie which 
makes me say, "I am superior to you," 
will destroy me in due time before your 

[50] 



FATHERLAND 

eyes, though I drive you daily with goads, 
and take the milk from your babes. 

Never was there such a time for a state- 
ment of simple truths. America stands 
with senses sharpened by illness; at least 
so stands the America not Prussian. 

England, Germany, France, Italy and 
Spain represent different stages of de- 
cay in structures not fashioned to endure. 
From the ripe decadence of Spain to the 
sharpening of wit's ends in England, each 
name tells the story of the rise of im- 
perial passion, the flatulence of predatory 
strength, and just as surely will tell the 
story of miserable empty ending. 

Spain now is a dull red dot in the west- 
ern sky ; Italy not so low nor red, though 
her people are scattered, without espe- 
cial dominance anywhere, without cohe- 
rence of principle or coordination of ac- 
tion, a sapped and ridden Rome, very far 
from an eternal city, a smile instead of 
that. France has not the vitality of her 
enemy, nor of her allies. She will be able 
[51] 



FATHERLAND 

to cope with neither at the end of this 
war. One need look no further than her 
own physical sterility to turn to the low 
west for France. She is there — part of 
the waning constellation which might be 
called Mediterrania. Even though her all 
is at stake, her fighting during the first 
fall days in her own vineyards will be 
her greatest fighting, for the stamina has 
been drained from the French spine. 

Carlyle believed that Germany would 
sometime he Europe, but he judged from 
the Germany before 1870, the Germany 
of Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, possi- 
bly in part from the Germany of Bis- 
marck. The Germany Carlyle loved had 
not ceased to build its empire in the sky; 
but the Germany of the last fifty years 
has sadly forgotten the stars, and will be- 
come the example for future ages of all 
that a Fatherland must not be. For it 
was a Fatherland that turned the eyes 
of its children to the ground. Men of 
Cain's breed come from looking down — 

[52] 



FATHERLAND 

slayers and madmen, frenziedly getting, 
for that is the meaning of Cain — not pas- 
tors. 

The Gods of matter are the devils of 
men. These gods are manifesting now 
afield, because the Fatherland did not 
teach its children to subdue matter, rather 
to become machine-men, slaves to matter, 
men of disgusting efficiency in small 
things and blinking deaf as the bandar- 
log to immortal things. 

With all its mighty engines and per- 
fected detail, the German war-machine 
will break of its own weight. It is that 
high mystery roughly named morale 
which wins wars. 

The nation that looks down finds first 
of all its stomach. You can estimate the 
value of a soldier by the size of his girth; 
the larger the belt-line the poorer the sol- 
dier. The men who will win this war will 
win through famine. Enlarged stomachs 
and fatty hearts are not formed for that. 
Spirit, the white fire, is the stuff of morale, 
[53] 



FATHERLAND 

not sentiment. Sentiment is purely a red 
flesh matter which dies with each body, 
and does not lend itself to augment the 
heroism of survivors. 

England is not a sentiment, but an in- 
stitution. She is in at every case of ob- 
stetrics within her dominion, and by some 
subtle prowess becomes identified with the 
personality of her subjects. She is not 
a part of the white fire of her people; 
in fact she maims her genius by enslav- 
ing him to England and blinding him to 
the world. There is always her adhesion 
in the soul of a British genius which keeps 
it an Englishman instead of a cosmic 
force. Her commonest subject, treated 
to every abomination at home, is no sooner 
abroad than he lifts his head in serene 
contempt for all who are not English — a 
divine-right sort of self -conviction now 
denoted because it is a kind of morale 
afield, and a better thing to fight with 
than sentiment; also the British ranker in 

[54] 



FATHERLAND 

many cases has been inured to famine at 
home. 

England, at this moment, has three 
fears. I believe in the breasts of those 
who see farthest, the least of these three 
fears has to do with Germany. There is 
devouring terror in the British heart as 
to what may be taking place under the 
yoke in India. The key to the length of 
the British future is India; and London, 
which rules the English press of the world 
to-day, as she did ten years ago for Japan 
against Russia, has so far been able to 
keep us from hearing India's voice. If 
the spirit of India remains crushed 
through this war, her physical tributes, 
together with the solid British adherence, 
will reckon with Russia long after France 
and Germany are silent. 

Russia, her present ally, but ancient and 
structural foe, is England's third and pos- 
sibly her greatest fear. 

She does well to fear Russia, who holds 
the whij) hand of the whole argument, ac- 
[55] 



FATHERLAND 

cording to this outlook. Russia has com- 
mensurate land for her population. She 
needs sea-doors and she will get them. 
Petrograd isn't the only city that will lose 
"burg" from its name. Russia is the vast 
new surface upon which the future of 
Europe is to be written. Nature is sick of 
wi'iting history upon the defiled surfaces 
of small predatory powers. . . . Not the 
Russia of Nicholas — but the peasant mil- 
lions of Russia, holding in its great mass 
the finest genius of to-day, as a clustered 
bee-swarm shelters its queen-mother, the 
future — these are the men of Europe's 
to-morrow. They are not yet defiled, be- 
cause they are still childi'en. These vast 
things move slowly. 

They come from the north like all in- 
vaders; they come from the cold broad 
lands of poverty; they have been kept 
clean by the rigors of Nature, and mod- 
erate in their appetites by the thievery of 
their masters. These red-blooded milhons 
have not yet had their voice in the world, 

[56] 



FATHERLAND 

and Mother Nature gives a voice to every 
people before it passes. They represent 
the spirit of youth which must be served. 
This that we hear is not Russia's swan- 
song, but the anthem for the birth of her 
new soul. 

. . . They have not all been shot and 
hanged. There is left a leavening of a 
future Fatherland, which will be pure, at 
least in its inception, as America was. 
There are men in Russia who have heard 
the mighty music of humanity. They will 
sing their dream and grave their message 
upon the peasant soul. 

Not the Russia of Nicholas Romanoff. 
Red Sunday was the beginning of the end 
forever of the Little Father. His passing 
and all the princes of his tainted blood will 
prove but an incident of the Great War. 
Very low in the west among the red blink- 
ing points of Mediterrania is Nicholas and 
that Russia. In the East is the Russian 
novae before the dawn, commanding the 
dark before the sun. 
[5T] 



FATHERLAND 

. . . Miles of bayonets rusted in their 
fixity, miles of ashen faces and sodden 
gray coats — the dust of their tramping, 
the heaven of their singing. This is the 
Russian peasantry on the march, a mov- 
ing storehouse of the earth's future spirit, 
the genius of her coming days. They 
leave the sane brown yielding earth, all 
gilded with the beauty of harvests, for the 
red fields of madness. They march from 
cosmos to chaos. . . . There is an end to 
the singing; the hour has come of fire and 
blood. Through the wind tattered smoke, 
there is the strewn field covered with silent 
men and writhing men. The remnant rises 
and marches on. . . . But one face to me, 
not in helmet nor cap, but in a derby, old 
and absurd — a face of torture and bewil- 
derment — rising from the field and march- 
ing on. , . . "Hai, Joe, turn back to the 
woman and the boy ! Hai, Joe, where are 
you marching?" 

It is the peasantry of the North march- 
ing a last time to find its Fatherland. 

[58] 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

FATHERlil . 

021 547 760 5 * 

By 

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 

Author of ** Midstream,** "Down Among Men,** 
"Routledge Rides Alone,** etc. 

With a Poem of the Great War 



THE ARMY OF THE DEAD 

BY BARRY PAIN 



^T The Great War has touched America. Out of 
^^ trench and mine, toiling men go back to Europe 
and to unhappy death for fatherlands no longer theirs. 



^T Will Comfort, the great war-correspondent who 
^J^ hates war, watched Joe, the Russian, march off — 
not because he wanted the music of bugles, but because 
he was trained to obey. 



^T No man has a more passionate vision of the sorrow 
^J^ of the peasants, the men who plow and fight that 
kings may eat and grow great, than has Will Comfort; 
and here is the sharp intensity of that vision — with a 
new vision of the time when kings shall no longer 
pave triumphal highways with the bodies of peasants. 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Publisher. New York 



